Andrew Veloso Watkinson

In When the Body Disappears, Andrew Veloso Watkinson questions his mortality through the pursuit of becoming immortal. Immortality has been an important and, until now, largely unquestioned element in Andrew’s research and practice, and through this process, he explores what it might truly entail and whether it is, indeed, worth pursuing. 

Channelling this wish to escape an inevitable death, Andrew crafts the artefacts of an immortal being; a ceramic shell to contain and preserve the body, and a series of 'pattern maps' charting processes of living across and within bodies. Making the shell from such a long-lived, earthly material, he aims to prevent his body from slipping into the outside; to prevent it from dissolving into the earth’s webs and systems and reuniting with its patterns. Inversely, the paper 'pattern maps' are far more fragile, unable to hold these understandings of the world for very long.

Whilst life and death are always in a repetitive and imperative dialogue with one another, on a personal level they are also very contradictory and binary; you either live or die. Both this repetition and contrariety have had a significant role for Andrew in the creation of the visual language of the work, developing into a rich variety of patterns. The immersive feeling of repetition, the installation and patterns provoke hints to the complexity and endlessness of the systems that run this earth; the systems that are created by the patterns of life and death.

This page was last updated on June 15, 2023